3 Ways to Win Market Share in 2016

If you’re like 85 percent of retail marketers today, you’ve called in reinforcements.

The vast majority of retailers use some kind of marketing technology, each designed to deliver on some part of the shopper journey. This has contributed to the massive growth of the industry. According to IDC, the marketing technology business is expanding at a 12.4 percent clip, and is set to reach $32B by 2018. In addition to profound growth, ready adoption of new solutions has also contributed to significant challenges for the IT and marketing teams that use them.

Marketing and IT: A Love Story?
Well, not really. At least not yet.

Marketing is fast becoming a technology business, causing the lines between two historically separate groups to blur. It’s an uncomfortable adjustment, especially for well-established organizations, but a harmonious future for marketing and IT isn’t out of the question. Like most relationships, this one could benefit from better communication, agreement on a shared future vision and a little patience.

IT spends 14 percent of their time troubleshooting marketing technology. This may explain why marketing execs reported they value ease of integration more than anything else when evaluating 85 percent of marketing tech vendors considered by retail organizations.

Marketers, on the other hand, look for experience in the market and customer service — two attributes not necessarily associated with nimble solutions built for easy implementation across a diverse array of retail technology stacks.

To ensure marketing technology supports the greater good of an organization, it must be evaluated from both sides with a mutual long-term vision in mind. At present, that vision is firmly centered around cross-channel personalization. Well, for marketers at least.

The Research
To understand the challenges of evaluating and onboarding new marketing technologies, we asked the people who use them. Persio commissioned a third-party research study, targeting marketing and IT decision makers at large chain retailers to answer the following:

• What dependencies exist between marketing and IT in the current environment?
• What are the biggest pain points of onboarding and using new tech?
• How are resources being used to leverage new solutions?
• How do the views of these groups differ? How are they aligned?
• How can we improve processes and outcomes?

Based on this research, we outline realistic recommendations for evaluating new marketing technology that will reduce friction and improve the return on investment of these tools.

The Solution: 3 Key Criteria
For retailers to win market share in 2016, the technologies they use must collectively advance the way they market to customers. If one channel solution outperforms another, the chain is broken and the impact on the consumer is poor. Thus, all technologies adopted by an organization must meet three key criteria:

• integrates simply with other systems;
• improves access to data; and
• supports connections across channels.

The full report outlines in detail how and why these criteria will increase market share for retailers over the long term, extracting data from the survey to support these conclusions.

Kate Atty is director of marketing at Persio, a multichannel marketing and decisioning platform.